Can the neutrinos from TXS 0506+056 have a coronal origin?

Abstract

The blazar TXS 0506+056 has been the first astrophysical source associated with high-energy astrophysical neutrinos, and it has emerged as the second-most-prominent hotspot in the neutrino sky over ten years of observations. Although neutrino production in blazars has traditionally been attributed to processes in the powerful relativistic jet, the observation of a significant neutrino flux from NGC 1068 -- presumably coming from the Active Galactic Nucleus (AGN) corona -- suggests that neutrinos can also be produced in the cores of AGN. This raises the question whether neutrino production in TXS~0506+056 is also associated with the core region. We study this scenario, focusing on the hypothesis that this blazar is a masquerading BL Lac, a high-excitation quasar with hidden broad emission lines and a standard accretion disk. We show that magnetic reconnection is an acceleration process necessary to reach tens of PeV proton energies, and we use observationally motivated estimates of the X-ray luminosity of the coronal region to predict the emission of secondaries and compare them to the observed multi-wavelength and neutrino spectra of the source. We find that the coronal neutrino emission from TXS 0506+056 is too low to describe the IceCube observed neutrinos from this AGN, which in turn suggests that the blazar jet remains the preferred location for neutrino production.